Chapter 60 Rumors trigger board shake-up

At the end of 2010, all Huawei's shareholding employees voted to elect 51 shareholding employee representatives, and these 51 shareholding employee representatives elected the new board of directors and board of supervisors on January 15, 2011. Sun Yafang continued to serve as the chairman, while the original board members, Huawei veterans Ji Ping and Fei Min withdrew from the board.Ren Zhengfei's younger brother Ren Shulu, younger sister Zheng Li, and son Ren Ping did not join the board of directors. On April 17, 2011, Huawei disclosed for the first time in its 2010 annual report the list of members of the board of directors and board of supervisors, resumes and photos, reflecting Huawei's continuous efforts in transparency and standardization.

The members of the board of directors have also changed a lot from the previous term. On the one hand, the number of members has increased significantly, and on the other hand, the composition of personnel is also quite different. A Huawei insider said: "The company's board of directors and EMT often need to add fresh blood, and it is very normal for new faces to appear." According to reports, Huawei's new board of directors and board of supervisors are young and vigorous; many board members have rich experience in cross-system management and have excellent strategic and overall views.For example, Yu Chengdong, Li Jie, Ding Yun, Meng Wanzhou, Chen Lifang, Wan Biao, Zhang Pingan and others, the number of new faces accounted for 7 of the 13 board members.Sun Yafang's stay in office is a powerful counterattack to the outside world's speculation about the "familyization" of Ren Zhengfei's leading company for more than a year.

Ren Zhengfei further expressed his determination to "delegate power" when the new board of directors was formed. This is also reflected in the drastic adjustments Huawei made to the company's business structure at the same time as the new board of directors was formed. In the future, its business division will break the previous classification by product. Turning to divide the company's business into four parts according to different customers, established four major business operation centers of carrier network business, enterprise network business, terminal business and other business, and set up their own management teams (EMT), each according to its corresponding According to the law of customer needs to determine the corresponding objectives, assessment and management operation mechanism, and carry out differentiated operation and management on a unified company platform.

It is understood that the re-election of the new board of directors and the adjustment of the company's structure are closely related to the pressure on Huawei's recent transformation. Huawei said: "Huawei's board of directors will increasingly strengthen the development model of the group holding company. The board of directors will further decentralize power and allow the four major businesses below to expand separately. Make management more open and transparent." Since November 2010, Ren Zhengfei has intensively made three meaningful speeches within the company. The three speeches expressed the challenges faced by Huawei, which is already in the position of "sit second and look first" in the global telecommunications equipment field, in issues such as corporate inheritance, business transformation, and public image.

The first is an internal speech on November 2, 2010 titled "We have to get used to developing in rumors".In response to the rumors that the media and the public believed that he intends to support his son Ren Ping to take over, which led to the resignation of his long-time partner Sun Yafang, he joked: "This is a 'Wahaha' problem. The media is very dull now. If it is not haha, everyone is very depressed. If there is no April Fool’s Day, it’s a big joke.” He also emphasized that Huawei’s shareholding structure has already determined its direction of “de-familyization”.

The second is Ren Zhengfei's speech at the "Huawei Cloud Computing Conference" on November 30, 2010.In this speech, he expounded the dual dilemma facing Huawei under the current industrial development trend - the telecommunications industry is facing a ceiling and the mutual penetration of the telecommunications industry and the IT industry in the "cloud computing" era will affect the overall impact of Huawei's business model, market strategy, and corporate culture. Orientation challenge.He is sensitively aware that Huawei must move away from the inertia of closed competition among telecommunications equipment vendors in the past, and move towards openness and cooperation.

Finally, he said that he would strengthen cooperation with the media and improve relations with the media. The "successor" rumor is caused by Huawei being too closed to the media.If Huawei welcomed the media to investigate and interview the company, there would be no such rumors. Some outsiders speculate that Ren Zhengfei is currently worrying about Huawei's lack of suitable successors.In fact, Huawei is not short of outstanding talents who can be the CEO at present, but the time for Ren Zhengfei to retire has not yet come, and he wants to train his future successors better.